viernes, 28 de enero de 2011

Results so far

I joined the engineering team that is building the core commons library to be used in all the games of the company. That was my big chance to sell the idea of entity systems over normal OOP. I created some prototypes and proof of concepts and little by little I was able to demonstrate that this change was actually a very good idea. I understood how important it is to go one step at a time, developers accepted the change progressively, but you need to show results.

At first the design was simple and the benefits of making this change were not clear enough to justify using entity systems, but after a few iterations it was so easy to extend, modify and add new functionality that everyone were completely on favor of using it.We still have some architecture issues to resolve, but it is working really good so far.

At this point I was able to implement a good design thanks to open source projects and discussion forums:
- Game objects and Game components
- Entity managers
- Messaging system
- Shared properties
- Component families
- Deferred disposal

The biggest problem that we are facing right now is that we only implemented game objects for only a subsystem inside a bigger system, meaning that we are mixing architectures. Try to avoid that as much as possible, handling an entity system from outside could be extremely difficult if you don't provide a simple interface or a facade to simplify access.

It is not possible to completely decouple the components in the context of the game, but that is not that important as long as the library components do not depend on specific game implementations.